Glucosinolates and Their Hydrolytic Products-A Love Story of Environmental, Biological and Chemical Conditions.

Abstract

Glucosinolates play important role in providing defense to plants and helps them in coping against various biotic as well as abiotic stress. Many living beings including humans, animals, and even some herbivores have adapted themselves to use this defense mechanism for their own use. More than 120 glucosinolates are distributed within a large number of plants. Many factors are known to influence the GSL composition in a plant. Among these, cofactors, myrosinase isozymes, heavy metals and the environmental conditions such as light, CO2 and temperature are important in the regulation. These factors ensure that different glucosinolate composition could be produced by the plants, thus impacting the defense mechanism. The objective of the current review is to highlight the importance of factors responsible for affecting glucosinolate composition and concentration. The review has been compiled using accessible literature from Pubmed, Scopus, and Google scholar. Efforts have been made to restrict the literature to the last 5 years (2018-2023), with some exceptions. The current critical review acts as a resource for all the researchers working on this essential compound. It provides information on the factors that may influence the glucosinolate production. It also gives them an opportunity to modify the glucosinolate composition of a plant using the given information. Glucosinolates have long been an ignored class of biomolecule. The plethora of biological activities of the compounds can be useful. Though there are some harmful components such as goitrin and progoitrin, these can be easily removed by modulating some of the factors highlighted in the review. The current review has touched base on almost all the factors that have the ability to modify glucosinolate composition and concentration. The mechanistic action of these factors have also been discussed using the current available literature.